Does Diet Food Delivery Really Fight Flab?

Lately there seem to be as many diet delivery services as celeb reality shows, and the odds of sticking with either for more than a week are about the same. They always sound so promising—portion-controlled meals and snacks arrive on your doorstep—but they can be expensive (ChefsDiet, for example, starts around $25 a day) and noncustomizable, which means you may get stuck with stuff you can't stand. Online giant eDiets has a solution: Deliciously Yours, which launched in April, will send you a week's worth of food (between 1,200 and 1,600 calories daily) for just over $130. Using the Web site's menu template, you can select three meals and one snack a day from 50-plus mail-order options and add your own dairy and fruit (eDiets packs the fresh—not frozen—food in ice but doesn't want to risk spoiled milk or bruised apples).

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Our tester found the down-home dishes (five-layer lasagna, old-fashioned meat loaf with mashed potatoes)—which are all nutritionist-approved and prepped by Culinary Institute of America-trained chefs—surprisingly filling and tasty. "By the end of the week, I had a sense of exactly how big a burrito should be and how many slices of turkey should be on my sandwich. I was shocked to realize a diet-friendly portion could leave me full," says WH deputy editor Nicole Beland. And because the program uses the same foods you can buy in the supermarket, the meals are easy to recreate on your own for long-term weight loss success. Which is more than you can say for the moves on Dancing with the Stars.

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